ABSTRACT
Strategies for nanoscale drug delivery require multidisciplinary cooperation to resolve problems in health care by using various nanomaterials. Nanomaterials possess feature sizes that are less than 100 nm, and their applications include clinical diagnostics, cellular tracking, biosensing, tissue scaffolds, and drug delivery (ierry and Textor 2012; Jia et al. 2013; Li et al. 2014a; Liu et al. 2014a,b). Of note, targeted drug delivery is a dream of which the ultimate goal is to control drug release in the affected cells without damaging the surrounding healthy tissues (Farokhzad et al. 2004; Asadishad et al. 2010; Vivero-Escoto et al. 2010; Li et al. 2014b). Experiments with nanoparticles have shown that this dream can be realized. For example, Figure 18.1 shows microscopic images of porous silica particles with hexagonally packed light dots and parallel stripes, which are localized in HeLa cells. It should be noted that there are many small molecules that could be used for drug delivery. However, in addition to poor solid-state stability and low solubility or dissolution, many small molecules exhibit low bioavailability (Santos et al. 2011; Du et al. 2014). ese challenges must be overcome before these molecules can be utilized in clinical application.
